Burkhardt Richard W
Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Isis. 2007 Dec;98(4):675-94. doi: 10.1086/529263.
French naturalists at the Muséum Nationale d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris in the early nineteenth century recognized that their individual and collective successes were intimately linked to questions of power over specimens. France's strength abroad affected the growth of the museum's collections. At the museum, preserving, naming, classifying, displaying, interpreting, and otherwise deploying specimens went hand in hand with promoting scientific theories, advancing scientific careers, and instructing the public. The control of specimens, both literally and figuratively, was the museum's ongoing concern. The leopard in this essay's title, a live specimen confiscated from the streets of Paris in 1793, serves here to represent the tensions created in an existing order of things by the introduction of a potentially disruptive agent. The essay explores the life of the museum and the interrelations among its naturalists, the special challenges created by the establishment of a menagerie, and the histories of particular specimens and ideas.
19世纪初，巴黎国家自然历史博物馆的法国博物学家们认识到，他们个人和集体的成就与对标本的控制权问题密切相关。法国在海外的实力影响着博物馆藏品的增长。在博物馆里，保存、命名、分类、展示、解读以及以其他方式利用标本，与推广科学理论、推进科学事业和教育公众是相辅相成的。对标本的控制，无论是实际意义上还是象征意义上，都是博物馆一直关注的问题。本文标题中的豹，是1793年从巴黎街头没收的一只活体标本，在此用来代表一个潜在的破坏因素的引入给现有事物秩序带来的紧张关系。本文探讨了博物馆的发展历程及其博物学家之间的相互关系、建立动物园所带来的特殊挑战，以及特定标本和思想的历史。
